1. Field
Subject matter presented herein relates to a technique for retrieving ambiguous information stored on a computer, and more particularly, to a technique for recreating a user's sense of déjà vu about targeted information to support the retrieval.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computers today are used for a variety of purposes, such as document creation, presentation, access to Web sites or image and audio playback. As the capacity of a hard disk drive (HDD) has been dramatically increased in recent years, the volume of data to be stored on a computer has also been being increased. Upon accessing a file that a user has accessed in the past, it will be easy to search for the file if the user remembers property information such as the file name or the date and time of creation of the file. However, if the user does not remember the property information, the user will have to fumble through large amounts of information to find the target file. There has been a method using a calendar to narrow down targets to be searched for. In this method, the file can be found based on information registered with each date on the calendar.
There has also been a technique for reducing the time to search again for a site on the Internet that one visited once. In this technique, sites and information already searched and browsed on the Internet are accumulated en bloc as thumbnails (reduced samples of images) to enable browsing of the past searched sites and information again in order to simplify the comparison examination between pieces of information as targets to be collected. Another technique for browsing a media file at high speed is configured to browse, for time periods, specific types of media files, annotated or bookmarked media files or a browsable parameter designated by another user so that the speed of browsing or the scrolling function can be altered depending on the desire of the user.
Although the method of narrowing down targets to be searched for based on the date on the calendar is effective for data registered with the calendar, a file to be searched for (hereinafter called “target file”) is not always registered with the calendar. In addition, if the user does not remember the date, the user will have difficulty finding the target file.
Images associated with a file are more memorable for people than property information, such as the file name or the date and time of creation of the file. If there is a mechanism for finding a specific file through images, the convenience of computers can be further enhanced.